Can You Recover Fast Enough?
Why speed is the real measure of resilience
Recovery isn’t just about whether systems can be restored, it’s about how quickly they can be restored. If recovery takes weeks, the delay and loss of access can be as damaging as the incident itself. Ultimately, recovery speed determines whether a disruption is manageable or business-threatening.
Why Rapid Recovery Really Matters
Today, recovery isn’t about restoring data eventually. It’s about restoring access quickly enough to keep the business moving. Every hour systems are unavailable impacts customers, revenue, staff productivity, and confidence across the organisation.
Businesses that recover quickly stay in control. Those that don’t often find that even a successful recovery comes too late to avoid serious knock-on effects. By the time systems are back, the damage is already done.
When Recovery Takes Too Long
In many incidents, backups are technically available but recovery is slow. Restores rely on manual processes, multiple tools, or infrastructure that wasn’t designed to bring large environments back online quickly.
While teams wait for systems to return, operations stall, and pressure builds. What could have been a contained incident turns into weeks of disruption simply because recovery speed wasn’t planned for.
Being able to recover isn’t enough if the business can’t function while it’s happening.
The Limits of Traditional Backup Thinking
Traditional backup strategies focus heavily on data retention: keeping copies, meeting compliance requirements, and ticking audit boxes. What they often don’t focus on is how recovery actually works under real-world conditions. Restore times are assumed rather than proven. Dependencies between systems aren’t always understood. And recovery plans are rarely tested in scenarios where time really matters.
Designing for Speed, Not Just Safety
After supporting 200+ ransomware recoveries, one thing has become clear: recovery speed is critical. Time and again, we’ve seen that the difference between disruption and disaster isn’t whether recovery is possible, but how quickly it can happen.
Rapid recovery needs to be implemented into your environment, it cannot be improvised when a crisis hits. That’s why, in our own environment, we’ve focused on building resilience at the storage layer, where recovery speed can be controlled and automated.
We use IBM FlashSystem as part of that approach, embedding immutability, automation, and fast restore capabilities directly into how data is protected. It means recovery isn’t reliant on fragile, manual processes at the worst possible moment. Instead, it’s predictable, repeatable, and aligned with how the business actually operates.
From “Eventually Back” to “Back in Business”
Organisations that invest in recovery speed regain access sooner, communicate more clearly, and return to normal operations before an incident defines them.
Those that don’t may still recover but often after the business has already been impacted.
Disruption is inevitable. Cyberattacks, system failures, and human error will happen. What matters is how long your organisation can afford to be without access to the systems it depends on.
The real question isn’t can you recover. It’s whether you can recover fast enough to keep the business running.